Tuesday, November 30, 2010
... /////

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), made an unusually honest statement for a U.N. climatic crook while vacationing in Cancún, Mexico:

At least the weather will be better.

And Spiegel even managed to leak this sensitive diplomatic cable. ;-) Given the fact that the climate is nothing else than the weather scrutinized over longer timescales, one may also conclude that the climate would be better in a hypothetically warmer world.

Together with her fellow climatic bureaucratic parasites, Figueres is enjoying 28 °C which is, helpfully, equal to 82 °F in the Moon Palace resort above. The Europeans and Americans may compare "her weather" with the weather they are experiencing right now.

In a widely publicized result, ATLAS at the LHC publishes its results about the dijet asymmetry in lead-lead collisions. Some jets - fraternities of hadrons arising from a single quark or gluon - apparently lose lots of energy by going through a hot, dense medium. This QCD effect can't be seen in the proton-proton collisions.

D0 at the Tevatron measured the WW and WZ production. It all agrees with the Standard Model and excludes new W-prime bosons and Randall-Sundrum gravitons up to 700 GeV or so.

The Tevatron teams including both D0 and CDF publish their extended Higgs boson search. Taking 12/fb of combined p-pbar data into account and looking at many channels, they exclude the modest interval 158-175 GeV we've heard about previously.

A young U.S. intelligence analyst - or anyone else - could have been behind the leak of 250,000 cables from U.S. embassies all over the world.

Whoever it was, he or she is obviously playing with fire and the WikiLeaks founder himself may be charged with espionage; Julian Assange is also investigated for rape in Sweden. More generally, it has both advantages and disadvantages to "measure" the intermediate stages of various processes. Note that in quantum mechanics, much like in diplomacy, such a measurement may influence the final results.

Obviously, the influence may be both "positive" as well as "negative", depending on whether the "secret work" is more constructive than the opinions of the interceptors who may interrupt it in the middle - which may include the whole public.

To get the honest quantum mechanical results for the original question, you must sum over all conceivable histories. It is often better for sensitive processes, research, and negotiations not to be interrupted and distracted in the middle.

However, once the diplomatic cables are published, I don't think that they're excessively shocking. We have still learned something, namely that

Monday, November 29, 2010
... /////

...the abundance of all other patterns ("random concentric circles") they may be observing statistically coincides with the standard WMAP prediction...

I have been making more explicit and quantitative calculations of the claims by Penrose and Gurzadyan and I finally understood what they actually see.

The explanation why the effect is there remains mysterious but what the effect actually is, in the usual terminology of cosmologists, is totally clear to me now. First, let us ask what is the spacing of their concentric circles.

Click to zoom in.

The graph above is borrowed from their paper. There are several similar graphs in the paper. You may see that the apparent radii of the concentric circles may be estimated as 4°, 9°, 14°, 19°. So the spacing between the concentric circles' radii as seen in the skies is 5° or so.

The authors claim that some concentric circles observed in the WMAP 7-year data at the 6-sigma confidence level provide us with evidence supporting Penrose's idiosyncratic version of pre-Big-Bang cosmology. (Their arithmetics clearly has to be checked by a serious person because 6-sigma corresponds to the 2 x 10^{-9} probability rather than 10^{-7} as they state.)

For a couple of years, Penrose has been saying that there was a period of cyclic events when the Universe was much smaller than it is today. The model is called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC).

Friday, November 26, 2010
... /////

The percentage of the Czechs who are climate alarmists is negligible today. Passionate desires to "save the planet" are virtually non-existent among the generic people which is also why the media rarely write about the topic and if they do, their approach is balanced in average.

Even in the academic system, there are just a few IPCC-faithful alarmists - right now, I can only think of Mr Ladislav Metelka as a clear example - and the number of skeptics is arguably higher: for example, Dr Miroslav Kutílek has just received a presidential medal. ;-) The alarmists are confined to the extreme environmentalist movements.

Of course, our president, Václav Klaus, is probably the most powerful climate realist among the world's politicians. Also, the party he founded - ODS - which is the main party forming the current government coalition - is "softly" on Klaus' side, too. Interestingly enough, the list of Klaus' soulmates more or less includes the current minister of environment. ;-)

However, this may change as people get paid from the EU.

As a Prague Post blog and lots of Czech media reported, the education minister has accepted a EUR 25 million - or USD 35 million - subsidy from the EU that will create a huge research team, "CzechGlobe", composed of 150 people in Brno, the second largest city in the country.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010
... /////

Sean Carroll has the remarkable ability to give a wrong answer to every single important question in thermodynamics and statistical physics. He has argued that the arrow of time must have a dynamical origin linked to cosmology - instead of the statistical properties of purely local physical systems whose probabilities also have to respect the logical arrow of time.

Instead of repeating my crisp and totally indisputable proofs that this is not possible, I will refer you to an authority because for many people, it's unfortunately more important than rational thinking. In a 2005 paper, Robert M. Wald, the author of a famous book on general relativity, proved that "it is not plausible that these special initial conditions have a dynamical origin."

In the best case, such explanations end up being examples of circular reasoning.

Maxwell demon

But incredibly enough, in a new text, Sean Caroll de facto argues that the perpetual-motion machine of the second kind is possible:

During communism, people had to smuggle lots of basic things if they wanted to have them. For example, my father had to smuggle Commodore 64 twice for me. ;-)

The communism collapsed by 1989 - in most of the socialist Europe. However, DDR has actually swallowed West Germany, updated its socialist ideology a little bit, and continues to terrorize the people who exchange goods and ideas in between the nations.

Mr Siegfried Rotthäuser and his brother have sold about 4,000 heatballs in the past. See

What is a heatball? It is a miniature source of heat - clearly a perfectly legal device according to the existing law. In order to guarantee that you won't heat your room when you don't want to, it also emits light to inform you that the heatball is turned on. An advantage of this piece of operational art is that you can use the sockets for (fluorescent) light bulbs. I am using several 100-Watt heatballs in my apartment, too.

Monday, November 22, 2010
... /////

The former largest - as of 2007 - Central European solar power plant in Ostrožská Lhota, the Czech Republic (near the Slovak border), occupies 40,000 m^2, produces 1.5 MWp (megawatts at peak conditions - that's just 37.5 Watts-peak per m^2), and its cost was CZK 100 million (CZK 2500 per m^2).

During the first year of its life, it produced 711 MWh (normal people would only pay CZK 3.5 million for this amount of energy - the payback period would be 30 years which is not far from the lifetime of solar cells - however I've been neglecting lots of other expenses): that's about 2 MWh a day in average which corresponds to 1.5 hours of peak traffic every average day only. ;-) Your humble correspondent did those calculations for you.

New power plants built on arable land have been de facto banned - see also below.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation reprints a November 17th article in Die Presse (Austria) about the newest decisions attempting to stop the insane solar boom in the Czech Republic:

A few years ago, the Czech politicians joined the bandwagon and introduced breathtaking subsidies for solar energy. Our subsidies and conditions were particularly generous. As a result, my homeland has probably seen the world's greatest annual percentage increase of the solar sources within the last year: by a whopping one order of magnitude per year!

It's hilariously entertaining and most of the people who fight against global warming in various ways - by stones in their pocket indulgences, and walking along one-choice spiral "labyrinths", among others - are just unbelievable. I can't believe that there are so many people who are so stupid and so easily robbed of their money.

Saturday, November 20, 2010
... /////

That could sound as a piece of crazy populist pseudoscience except that remarkably enough, it is not completely crazy.

My estimate of the likelihood that the extra dimensions are accessible the the LHC has always been around 1-2 percent which is, by the way, hugely higher than the probability that global warming will cause significant O(1) problems to the mankind, the world economy, or the biosphere in this century.

It would be absolutely spectacular if the extra dimensions were discovered. It's unlikely but it's not impossible because there are models with observable extra dimensions which are consistent with all the known observations - and that may even offer some advantages such as the ability to explain certain mysteries. In this text, we will look at some basic possible incarnations and properties of extra dimensions.

Friday, November 19, 2010
... /////

Among the physics fans, there's still a lot of confusion - sometimes deliberately propagated confusion - about the basic questions surrounding gauge unification.

So what is grand unification and what it can do for us?

Aside from gravity described by Einstein's general relativity, there are three non-gravitational forces: the electromagnetic interaction - unified in the 19th century; the weak nuclear force; and the strong nuclear force.

The last two interactions include the adjective "nuclear": that's why you need to look at the microscopic world and to use quantum mechanics to appreciate what they really mean. And that's the reason why Einstein never understood anything about them. He thought that the goal was to unify electromagnetism and gravity only; his attempts to construct a unified field theory had no chance to succeed because gravity is the last force that may join the other forces - but only a long time after one understands the unification of electromagnetism with the two nuclear forces.

Thursday, November 18, 2010
... /////

In Fall 2004, when I began to teach at Harvard, my first course was Physics 287a, Introduction to String Theory. Many excellent Harvard graduate students attended the course - and some people from MIT were also regular visitors.

One student of mine from MIT was more experienced than others and he always asked the best questions, even though he used to sleep throughout much of the lectures. His name was Alan Guth. ;-)

You know, such courses also typically attract some of the most ambitious undergraduate students. In many cases, these undergraduate students are just excellent and they beat many of the graduate students and become top researchers later in their life. However, there is no physical law that implies that the undergraduate students who register for an advanced graduate course have to be bright.

In that text, Yam says that their own poll was worthless (so why did they do it?), its results mean nothing, and even if they did, it's irrelevant because only 10% of the SciAm readers are scientists. According to SciAm editors, SciAm readers are almost entirely idiots whose reasoning and opinions should be neglected relatively to the "enlightened" inkspillers among the editors themselves.

The image shows our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the middle (horizontal). Above it and below it, there seem to be two huge bubbles filled with X-rays. At least that's what the data from Fermi (formerly known as GLAST) seem to say:

Wednesday, November 17, 2010
... /////

According to some polls among students, to be published in a journal in January 2011, dire warnings make the public disbelieve in a "just world" which is why they begin to "deny" things.

Instead, the climate alarmists should try to present the climate hysteria as a "patriotic" attitude. That won't be easy given the fact that the climate hysteria is one of the most obvious symbols of the anti-American and anti-capitalist hatred, self-whipping, fundamentally un-American ideologies, and high treason in general.

What I find spectacularly clear is that none of those people is actually interested in the scientific questions. They're interested in the best ways how to manipulate with other people. The decision "that" others should be manipulated is a dogma for them, much like the "direction" in which everyone should be manipulated: they're only interested in the question "how" the people should be manipulated.

No, sorry, the LHC hasn't yet announced the discovery of a neutralino, the most likely "lightest supersymmetric particle" (LSP) that could constitute most of the dark matter.

The ATLAS Boogie (blues). The video may appear on the individual page only. Links to extra audio snippets are below.

Instead, the Neutralino Records is the trademark under which music DVDs and CDs recorded by the CERN physicists working for the ATLAS experiment are being released. So far, they have released Resonance, a double CD with 36 tracks in total, and a DVD:

Tuesday, November 16, 2010
... /////

Decades ago, Wolfgang Pauli has proved the CPT-theorem. G. Lüders and J. Bell did the same thing almost independently in 1954 but all of them had to use Pauli's 1940 spin-statistics theorem.

Every Lorentz-invariant quantum field theory must be microscopically invariant under the simultaneous replacement of particles by antiparticles (C for charge conjugation), the reflection of shapes and positions in the mirror (P for parity), and the exchange of past and future (T for time reversal). The combined action is called the CPT-conjugation.

The separate symmetries may fail - although in the real world, the weak nuclear interactions are the only known processes that break C, P, and T (which is the same, because of the CPT-theorem, as PT, CT, and CP). All other forces preserve all the binary symmetries I listed. The experimental proof of a P- and C-violation in 1957 was a shock. Although people should have been much wiser seven years later, even the 1964 experimental proof of CP-violation was another shock. ;-)

According to various outlets such as People's Daily Online, Greek prime minister George Papandreou has supported the ideas of Nicolas Sarkozy to introduce a European continental climate tax. It could help the European finances, they say.

In recent days, a new wave of hysteria about the PIGS - Portugal, Ireland, and possibly Spain joining the Greek problems - has flourished in the markets. See The Telegraph.

Well, Papandreou is surely the right name to lead the whole continent to a solution of financial problems. His pathetic family has transformed a once great civilization into a preposterous dying socialist charade and a banana republic drowning in debt. Needless to say, the Greek citizens have to be blamed, too. They have systematically voted for these painful populist left-wing clowns.

Isaac Newton had to verify that his theory of gravity predicted the right elliptical orbits. How did he know they were ellipses? Well, Johannes Kepler determined his laws out of the very accurate data obtained by Tycho Brahe. Both Kepler and Brahe worked in Prague.

A statue of Kepler and Brahe in front of the Kepler High School, near the Prague Castle. Only in Summer 2010, I visited it for the first time.

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman - who has been incorrectly called Tycho de Brahe for centuries - and his death in October 1601 (aged 54+) remains a kind of mystery.

The classic legend says that he was so repelled by the idea of breaking the royal etiquette that he bravely but simply refused to go to the toilet during a long and fancy dinner (where Brahe got drunk a bit) hosted at the Rožmberk Palace of the Prague Castle (that has belonged to Rudolph II for a year, since 1600) by Petr Vok of Rožmberk on October 13th (where Brahe went in a great mood; the guests can only leave the table after the host): his bladder just exploded.

Maybe it didn't but when Brahe returned home, he could no longer use it. More modest sources only speak about a related bladder infection as opposed to an explosion. Others talk about kidney stones which are, according to modern medicine, needed for a bladder to explode (instead of empty itself).

The dinner came just a few days after Brahe's personal meeting with our Emperor Rudolph II who had just hired him to produce new accurate astronomical tables. After escalating pains, he died on October 24th amid tears and prayers by his family. His last words were "Let it be apparent that I didn't live my life in vain." At least Kepler has claimed so. ;-)

1. Wldmr: The fact that science asks “how?” rather than “why?” and therefore has no overlap with religion. People need to get over the idea that one somehow precludes the other.

I don’t think that was quite what you were asking for, but there it is.

Indeed, science usually asks detailed questions - "how" and "how much", among others. When it finds an explanation or a theory that works and predicts "how" objects behave or explains "how" they behaved or looked like, the scientists may be satisfied.

But when the theory that science finds doesn't look "perfect", science may also try to find a deeper explanation - "why" the imperfect or approximate theory worked. However, in the scientific context, this question means "how" a more satisfying or more accurate theory may produce a less satisfying one as an approximation.

Saturday, November 13, 2010
... /////

Many people face irrational problems when they attempt to understand special relativity or quantum mechanics and these problems have been discussed many times on this blog.

But in this text, I will look at somewhat more "technical" myths about the hypothetical problems of quantum field theory. Relativistic quantum field theory unifies the principles of quantum mechanics with those of special relativity - so all the difficult features of quantum mechanics and special relativity reappear in quantum field theory, too.

However, there exist additional hard features that are characteristic for quantum field theory and that may prevent folks from appreciating that quantum field theory is the correct theory of all non-gravitational phenomena ever observed, or a "theory of nearly everything" (TONE).

Thursday, November 11, 2010
... /////

Seventy-two years ago, on November 9th-10th, 1938, German Jews and their assets were attacked throughout Germany in an event known as the Crystal Night.

This old kind of fascism is dead in the country - at least in the mainstream - but other kinds of fascisms are only beginning to thrive. To commemorate the anniversary, the Green fascists in the Parliament have launched an assault against all German climate realists:

A letter not too tastefully titled "Deniers of climate change in the coalition government" (it used to be "Jewish elite spoiling the Aryan lives") signed by the whole Parliamentary faction of the Greater Green Party was sent to the government one week ago.

The participants of the "quantum debates" are encouraged to watch this inspiring, insightful, no-nonsense lecture given by Sidney Coleman at the New England sectional meeting of the American Physical Society (Apr. 9, 1994):

Sixteen years ago, the APS wasn't a shameful mouthpiece of the environmental extremists yet. It helped to nourish and promote actual physics.

A few years ago, when I was at Harvard, Brian Greene (together with a few friends at Columbia) asked me to arrange some copyrights so that he could have used this lecture, too.

I was kind of sure that he wouldn't use it - because in the lecture, Sidney Coleman crisply and beautifully clarified some of the very same points that I was trying to explain to Brian Greene just a few weeks earlier (before he asked me to get the permission).

While I thought and still think that The Fabric of the Cosmos is an excellent book, the "anything goes" attitude to pretty much all bizarre "interpretations" of quantum mechanics is perhaps too much out of control. And yes, the stuff in the FOC written about the arrow of time is just a full-fledged crackpottery.

In 1994, Sidney had also made similar comments about those who misunderstood why quantum mechanics just works - and it works according to its own rules.

Klaus have had conflicts with former environment ministers, especially Martin Bursík (2007-2009) of the largely defunct Green Party - which was a typical fundamentalist environmentalist party although it was much less "socialist" than its namesakes.

that looked for neutral Higgs bosons with an enhanced coupling to the bottom quarks. Such an unusually strong interaction could exist if tan(beta), the ratio of the two Higgs vevs in a supersymmetric standard model, were very high.

Being threatened that the inflow of the easy stolen taxpayer money may decelerate, a group of hardcore AGW crusaders has decided to switch into the ballistic mode.

A key person in the plan is Mr Abraham (whom I have never heard of but who is claimed to have starred in a well-known attack against Lord Monckton) from a former Minnesotan Catholic seminary of St Thomas in St Paul that also became an archdiocesan university later.

He established the so-called "climate rapid response team". About seven hundred similar AGW crusaders agreed to directly face skeptical audiences. How much is seven hundred? The article indicates that the term "seven hundred" has been redefined to mean approximately 39 (inform the Oxford Dictionary of English about the change), namely John Abraham from the Catholic seminary himself and Scott Mandia from Suffolk County Community College in New York. :-)

This is what I call a powerful group of intellectual giants. ;-) But don't forget Penny's implicit finding that community college graduates can be the opposite of complete losers (although Sheldon remained a bit skeptical)!

Maria Skłodowska was born on November 7th, 1867 - exactly 50 years before Lenin's Coup in Russia - in Warsaw, Russian Empire. Yes, the history of Poland was sometimes sad so the "Vistula Land", which is how the "Congress Poland" was known at the time, was a province of Russia.

Her parents (and grandfather) were well-known teachers and she had 4 older siblings. While her father was an atheist, her mother was a devout Catholic. Nevertheless, Maria's oldest sister died - and so did the mother - which led Maria to become agnostic. She spent some time in a boarding school and in countryside. Her family's assets were stolen by the Russian feudal bastards because the family cared about the Polish independence.

Friday, November 05, 2010
... /////

Now, my question is, if you know the answer: How high is the probability that arctic change is caused by AGW versus that is just natural variation of some kind (confidence level)?

His "calculation" is completely meaningless. It's not a real calculation.

A genuine calculation should try to find an objective - or mostly objective - value of an unknown number. However, Tamino's "calculation" uses two completely subjective (and unreasonably high) parameters as the input. They're inserted into Bayes' theorem, to achieve a completely nonsensical answer - namely that the probability above is 99.7%.

The Republicans grabbed 30 governors out of 50 which is 60 percent; Democrats only have 19 and 1 is independent.

The Senate was kept by the Democrats but the edge is only 52 (DEM) vs 48 (GOP), plus minus one.

The House which has had a Democratic majority so far was conquered by the GOP.

Out of the 435 members, the Republicans will control approximately 240 seats. The map looks "almost completely red" because the Democratic strongholds are densely populated areas. The new likely speaker, John Boehner (GOP), is an AGW skeptic which could change the atmosphere in the Congress (thanks to Peter P. for an important fix!).

Update: Years after this blog post was written, I learned about a totally sensible paper by Bram Gaasbeek which explains why the experiment contains no paradoxes, no retrocausality, and no new physics. Quantum mechanics with the normal Born's rule etc. is enough. Correlation doesn't imply causation. The moment of the co-collapse may be different for different observers but at the end, they will agree on facts they should agree upon.Update 2: See also a 2016 blog post focusing on (non-existent) retrocausality in this experiment.

Because our and our ancestors' experiences have been largely formed by the logic of classical physics for millions of years, we find quantum mechanics counter-intuitive.

However, for everyone who is interested in physics, there should eventually come a moment in which he realizes that quantum mechanics works.

He (or she) should learn how it works, he should appreciate that the predictions are uniformly confirmed by observations, he should see that the quantum predictions approximately reduce to the classical ones whenever they should, and that there is nothing paradoxical or retrocausal about quantum mechanics.

Thursday, November 04, 2010
... /////

Nature is clearly not an expert journal for high-energy physics or a source of the most important articles. We've seen another piece of evidence for this fact yesterday. You may have read some hype about a paper freshly published in Nature:

The last article even claims that the citations of this article are going to go into the stratosphere. Wow. Not bad. ;-)

Needless to say, while the paper is probably just an OK piece of work that could be used as the official solution to a homework in a quantum field theory course, this ambitious statement is preposterous and the preprint is going to be a low-citation preprint. I am more than eager to make a bet that it will be below 100 cits in one year.

In September, when the luminosity was just a few inverse picobarns per month (and not per day what it is now when the machine is running), the LHC collider managed to realize a pretty nice collision. Fortunately, the CMS detector just happened to be around to see it. Imagine, one of the relatively few ZZ productions in the Solar System ever - and a powerful detector just sits next to it. :-)

You see that four muons were created. One may reconstruct the momentum of the muons and add them - and the invariant masses show that they came from two decaying Z bosons. The CMS is good at seeing muons - muon is what the "M" in its name stands for - so it couldn't have missed the event. The event is pretty cool because the production of two Z bosons in the final state is a pretty rare process.

Monday, November 01, 2010
... /////

Several climate skeptics, including James Delingpole, Marc Morano, and Doug Hoffman, believe that biodiversity is the next big crisis, the next big lie. As the climate alarmism is getting unsustainable, the alarmists are going to jump on a new bandwagon. Is it true?

Well, I am very skeptical. First, the climate alarmism is not yet over. It seems clear that its power has been substantially diminishing for a year or two and it can receive another serious blow as soon as tomorrow ;-).

He lists three different interpretations of the word "supernatural" and kind of reasonably explains the status of each. As I will mention again, the three types of "supernatural" are the silent; the hidden; and the lawless.

Let me first say that as far as I can say, there is nothing supernatural about dark matter, whatever interpretation of the word "supernatural" you choose. After all, we are pretty likely to learn that it is mostly composed of the neutralinos which are as natural particles as photons (their superpartners' cousins) or electrons or neutrinos (other spin-1/2 particles).

(I avoided quarks because they are confined which could be another type of "supernatural" for some people and I don't want to add new layers of technicalities.)

Your humble correspondent is proud to have been the community organizer who has convinced the Canadian musician Don Garbutt to compose the candidate anthem of the ATLAS collisions. It wasn't so hard to convince him. ;-)

However, if your music taste is as conservative as mine, you should listen to the clip about 10 times before you decide whether you love it or not. :-)